Review: Lazarus Planet: Revenge of the Gods hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

I very much hope one day we get an omnibus collecting the entirety of Becky Cloonan and Michael Conrad’s Wonder Woman run, from Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Afterworlds to Trial of the Amazons and through Lazarus Planet: Revenge of the Gods to the end, along with Stephanie Williams and Vita Ayala’s Nubia books and the Wonder Girl: Homecoming Yara Flor miniseries, even Josie Campbell’s related New Champion of Shazam miniseries. All together, its the most comprehensive, multi-faceted instance of a multi-title Wonder Woman universe as we’ve seen across the DC Universe, perhaps ever.

If only it were also really good.

I won’t recount the entirety of this run here, but I believe what stands for Lazarus Planet: Revenge of the Gods (main story by G. Willow Wilson, with backups and crossovers by Cloonan/Conrad and Campbell) stands for this Wonder Woman era as a whole. It has everything going for it — a Diana written as competent and capable, a supporting cast of some of her best-known allies and enemies, romantic interests with a remarkable lack of melodrama. But equally, neither Diana nor the reader every feel particularly challenged here — the villains campy and easily defeated, the stakes overwhelmingly low.

As is often also the case with the Super-books, I look to the Wonder Woman books and wonder, why does this seem so consistently effortless for the Batman titles but Wonder Woman can’t seem to do it? A book like Batman: Fear State had villains who were effective, a grand finale that was pulse-pouding, fisticuffs that feel dynamic — letting alone that even a non-crossover, like Batman Vol. 1: Failsafe, is equally gripping reading. Revenge of the Gods is fine in all the ways I mentioned, but it mostly consists of Diana going to Olympus, returning to Washington, and hitting the villain for a while. Nothing here to be ashamed of, but neither does it rise above the commonplace. Despite this whole Wonder Woman era’s expansiveness, this has remained the central problem.

[Review contains spoilers]

Revenge, to its credit, has a couple of what I referred to in my notes as “Avengers moments.” There’s one in the third issue proper and one in Wonder Woman #798 (included here with #797), in which one or more of Diana, Steve Trevor, Etta Candy, the Cheetah, Viking warrior Siegfried, Wonder Girl Yara Flor, and champions of Shazam Billy and Mary gather against their collective enemies, the imaginary camera panning and the imaginary theme music swelling. For the simple joy of seeing a bunch of comics heroes on the page together, Revenge delivers.

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Having Shazam (nee Captain Marvel) here is particularly fun, putting me in mind of his presence in War of the Gods and instant-classic tussling with Lobo. For a good part of this book, Billy is teamed with Yara, and it was fun to see this old and new character together and for Wilson to build for Yara some friendships. Campbell’s New Champion miniseries was a highlight of all of this, and her backup stories here of plucky Mary Marvel (with art by Caitlin Yarsky) are some of the best parts.

But where I mention that Revenge has a couple “Avengers moments,” that’s because almost half of the book is given over to Diana and friends fighting on the streets of Washington, in sequences that tend toward repetitive. The beginning sees Diana and Billy and Yara infiltrating and escaping Olympus, and then the end is all fights — versus god-minions, versus Hera, then versus Hera again. Many of these pacing problems are from Cloonan and Conrad’s Wonder Woman and Wilson’s Revenge hitting the same notes; the result is Diana and Hera spar and spar until unceremoniously, in the fourth issue, Diana “finally” punches Hera hard enough that the story can end.

Having Hera as the book’s villain at all felt repetitive, given Brian Azzarello’s significant use of Hera in his New 52 Wonder Woman run, not to mention no indication of Diana and Hera’s grudging understanding and friendship in those books. Indeed that’s from a different continuity, I know, though we’re meant to be in an “all continuities in play” period, and aligning this with that would at least make the repetition seem intentional and not perhaps that Wilson wasn’t familiar with Azzarello’s run. So too Hera’s motivation, trying to reignite faith in the Olympian gods, feels like a plot we’ve seen in Wonder Woman before.

(Not to mention, Cloonan and Conrad’s Wonder Woman Vol. 3: The Villainy of Our Fears made specific reference to Diana coming from clay, but Revenge often mentions Zeus as Diana’s father; it seems even the writers aren’t quite sure Diana’s origins.)

Again, Revenge collects the four-issue miniseries plus two Wonder Woman issues. As these things go, it’s organized well enough — Wonder Woman #797 feels more integral, as Revenge #1 leaves her in one place and Revenge #3 picks her up in another, with only #797 to explain the move, whereas if you look carefully you can see how Revenge #3 to #4 ignores Wonder Woman #798 entirely even as it’s placed in the middle.

But bothersome on that point is that the truce between Diana and the gods is brokered with Eros' severed hand that Yara lopped off in Wonder Woman #796, which is not collected here but in Wonder Woman Vol. 4: Revenge of the Gods. In single issues this is a clever pass — Cloonan and Conrad established the element, Wilson uses it in her finale — but in the collections it means an integral element of Revenge doesn’t make sense without first reading a separate Wonder Woman book. And Wonder Woman Vol. 4 collects issues #795–800 — so before, after, and during Revenge — such that one has to both read just the beginning of the Wonder Woman collection and then stop, and also ostensibly to double-dip by two issues, to get the full impact of Revenge. (Trial of the Amazons and Tales of the Amazons had a similar problem.)

Special mention of artist Cian Tormey on Lazarus Planet: Revenge of the Gods, whose open, just-slightly-animated art is quite right for the Billy Batson spotlight, with shades of Pete Woods. Again, in all this book is fine, particularly in the sense of getting a whole mess of Wonder Woman characters together on the page. It’s to DC’s credit that Wonder Woman has had not one but two event miniseries in the Infinite Frontier-ish era; that’s moving in the right direction, and now we just need some higher-caliber stories to back it up.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.25